Intro
There are a number of AI-powered tools I have developed over time which I use every day that help me with reading and learning. I decided early on to make them all open source and freely available to everyone, so that others might find them useful as well. What follows is a list of these tools, along with a brief description of each and how to use them.
Summarizer and Context-Aware Dictionary for Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge
As someone who needs to read many pages online, I’ve found it painful to have to read all the way through every single article just to discover the three sentences that actually matter. As a result, I created a lightweight summarizer extension for Chromium-based browsers (such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge) that enables this very functionality. It tells you why an article might matter, and gives you the gist of it in less than three short paragraphs.
Another essential functionality of this plugin is an instant, context-aware English dictionary. As a lifelong learner of English, I’ve found several limitations with traditional dictionaries, including:
- A traditional dictionary gives you multiple possible definitions of a word, and you need to decide based on the context in which it appears which definition might be correct.
- Traditional dictionaries, and especially dictionary software, often don’t support looking up compound words and expressions, or at the very least are very picky about how you can look up a word, making it very hard to find what you are looking for.
- Many words and terms may only make sense in the context of a particular book or article, and traditional dictionaries can’t give you a definition for them.
For this extension, I decided to create a dictionary tool that eliminates all the shortcomings of older dictionaries mentioned above. Specifically:
- It takes into account the surrounding context of where the selected words appear, giving you the single, accurate definition.
- You can easily look up compound words and expressions.
- Words and expressions that may only make sense in the context of a particular book (think science fiction) are also supported.
You can find the extension, along with instructions for how to use it, here.
Writing Tools for Obsidian
I use Obsidian for basically all my writing and note-taking. As a non-native English speaker, I constantly need to check my writing for correctness and whether my word choice actually conveys the meaning I intend. This used to be really difficult just a few years ago, but with AI chatbots things got way easier. The only remaining inconvenience for me was that I constantly went back and forth between Obsidian and ChatGPT to ask for writing corrections. So I created a plugin called AI Writing Tools for Obsidian that enables me to do all my writing and proofreading in one place—Obsidian. I also added a context-aware dictionary feature to it to make sure my word choice is right.
If you think this is something that might be useful for you, you can grab the plugin here.
AI Dictionary for E-Book Readers
This is the plugin that started it all. I’ve been a fan of e-book readers for as long as I can remember, and have personally gotten a lot of use out of the built-in dictionary function of Kindle devices, where you long-press on a word and it gives you its definition(s). The downside is that this functionality still has all the problems of traditional dictionaries—no context, no multi-word selection, and limited technical/fictional knowledge. Out of frustration with these limitations, I created a custom AI-based dictionary plugin for e-book readers, initially for my personal use. After having used it for months, I simply can’t go back to using classic dictionaries. If you have an e-reader, I can’t recommend this plugin enough. You can get it here
Closing Thoughts
I originally developed these tools for my own personal use, but after seeing the transformative effect they can have on my learning and reading, I decided to share them with everyone for free, and as open-source software. I have already shared them with others on a couple of different social networks, and the response I have gotten has been surprisingly strong and positive, with quite a few people finding some use for them in their daily lives.
One interesting thing I’ve observed is that AI has been so controversial for the past couple of years that it seems a lot of people have simply decided to say no to anything with AI in it, and I agree that some of it is justified. The term “AI” is so overused that it feels strange when a new product isn’t advertised as having some sort of artificial intelligence in it. On the other end of the spectrum we have the true believers in AI, that it’s humanity’s answer to every single one of its problems. This contrast between the different ways people treat AI has caused the reception to these plugins be very interesting at times, so much so that my e-book reader dictionary plugin almost started a war in the KOReader subreddit—a lot of people found it genuinely useful, but still others gave it a lot of hate simply because it uses AI.
Admittedly, it was fun to watch the two more vocal sides battle it out. My own stance on this issue is that AI is unquestionably a powerful tool, and in this particular case, since text-based AI has become so advanced over the past couple of years, there’s no reason why we can’t use it to supercharge all of our workflows that deal with text in one way or another—reading being one of the primary candidates. I hate the overuse of AI just as much as the next person, but having been using these tools for months, I have no doubt that they are truly useful and can help people, and that’s where I draw the line when it comes to whether the use of AI is justified.
I hope these tools can be as useful for you as they have been for me, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on them. Also, since they are open-source, you are fully welcome to make your own contributions to them. Cheers!
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